Valdemar: The Last Herald - Mage by Mercedes Lackey

If you will remember, I talked about the 38 books and counting in the Valdemar saga with The Mage Wars. I enjoyed the worldbuilding and was super excited about diving into the more contemporary world of Valdemar in The Last Herald - Mage trilogy. Let's see how that shook out, shall we?

The first book up was Magic's Pawn. It was available to borrow immediately on my Libby app one day, so you best believe I snapped it right up. The other books have waits and I'm all out of Libby holds, so who knows how long it will take me to get through this trilogy. Anyway. Library woes aside, let's dig in.

Vanyel is a sensitive guy who wants to be a Bard, but his dad wants him to be a warrior. After Vanyel suffers some serious abuse at the hands of a weaponsmaster*, he is sent to be fostered by his aunt, Savil, a Herald-Mage. It becomes clear that Van isn't mage material, but he soon falls in love with Tylendel. This middle third of this book is a gay romance about two adolescent boys, codependency, and the corrupting power of young love. Ha!  But then something terrible happens and Van is left alone and suddenly has all kinds of power and no idea how to use it productively without damaging himself or others.

Van is Chosen by a Companion, Yfandes, who is a highly intelligent magical creature who looks like a horse, but isn't actually a horse, so we do get some magical animals in this book. For the last third of the book, Van has to deal with the loss of his love and learn to control his newfound powers.

Look, this book is sort of wonderful in a how did Lackey get this gay romance published in 1989 kind of way. It's melodramatic, over-the-top, and is just a smidge ridiculous. It seems like its mission was to be a one-volume young adult novel with themes of tolerance and acceptance and self-love and it honestly was a tad preachy, but also did I mention it was published in 1989?  This is a gay book with gay themes and it's not above loudly proclaiming its gayness with a great deal of pride.  

I was disappointed because it seems like a lot of the creatures and magic that existed in The Mage Wars has been lost in the intervening decades? centuries?, but I do sort of like this new world, too. It's full of surprises and seems to have an even deeper mythos of magic. I'll be sticking with it. 

*Seriously, friends, the first two chapters were just scenes of child abuse and it took me a very long time to get through them.

3.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

The truism ran "Pain shared is pain halved" - but this pain was doubled on being shared. (page 195)

Interesting. I am thinking of times when I knew talking about something would ease my own suffering and sometimes it's fine for the other person, but sometimes it means that someone else has something to worry about. I'm not sure how I feel about the truism or its reverse. 

"The great love is gone. There are still little loves - friend to friend, brother to sister, student to teacher. Will you deny yourself comfort at the hearthfire of a cottage because you may no longer sit by the fireplace of a palace? Will you deny yourself to those who reach out to you in hopes of warming themselves at your hearthfire? That is cruel..."(page 297)

Grieving is hard. 

Things I looked up:

gambeson (page 10): a padded defensive jacket, worn as armor separately, or combined with mail and plate armor

gittern (page 25): a medieval instrument shaped like a lute but with a smaller pear-shaped body

Gittern. Marginal decoration from The Hours of Charles the Noble (ca.1404). Cleveland Museum of Art 64.40, fol. 278v.

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The next book is Magic's Promise. Now, at this point, I checked out the omnibus collection of all three of the books in this series. This is a giant physical book. 

I feel like I need to define some Valdemar terms before we go too much further. A mage is someone who does magic. A herald someone who is Chosen by a Companion, the horse that is really not a horse creature. A herald-mage is rare and combines both of these traits. It took me a really long time on the Valdemar wiki to figure all this out. 

Anyway, at the beginning of this book, it's twelve years after the end of the previous one. Van has been on the Border, fighting, and he ends up returning to his home to get some rest. But he's awakened one night by the call of another herald and his Companion. And suddenly he's involved in a really big mystery that could bring war to his father's lands. 

Van is so lonely. He's exhausted from being on the frontlines. He's the most powerful herald-mage of the age. Bards sing stories of his exploits, but all Van wants is to sleep. Unfortunately, that's not meant to happen and he has to mentor an unstable young herald, broker peace, get over his childhood trauma with the armsmaster, and get over his grief. Wow. Lots going on for Van. 

I love how Lackey makes Van so relatable. I mean, I'm never going to save the world or do magic unheard of for generations, but Van's problems are the same problems we have. His relationship with his parents is complicated. He has unresolved trauma. He is lonely. And these are all problems we can relate to. I may still be slightly confused about the world of Valdemar and have to consult the Wiki with some regularity, but I'm all in at this point.

4/5 stars

Line of note:
Despite everything he'd told himself, despite being adult and with experiences behind him Withen could not even imagine, Van felt his shoulders beginning to knot with anxiety the moment he crossed the gate marking the edge of the Forst Reach lands. By the time he rode through the gate in the wall that surrounded the Great House of the estate, he was fighting to keep himself from hunching down in the saddle like a sullen, frightened child. (page 346)

Ha ha. This is me every time I cross the border into Michigan.

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At this point, it's getting kind of challenging to physically hold the omnibus version of this trilogy, but I'm all in and Magic's Price is next. Eight years have passed since the end of the last book. King Randale is quite ill and we're introduced to a young bard named Stefen, who is able to bring some relief to the monarch. Van falls in love with Stefen and things are going somewhat okay until something starts happening and all the Herald-Mages start dying. 

There's so much in this book. I kept asking my husband really silly hypothetical questions based on it:

Hey, if your new brand new lover was potentially the reincarnation of your previous lifebonded partner, would you want to know?

How do we feel about age gaps in romantic relationships again?

What role does suicide play in the afterlife? If it's accepted in a culture that the afterlife is real, is it fair for someone to be alone in the rest of their time on this plane of existence?

And then at the very end of the book, I felt like I had suddenly been dropped into an Outlander book, with unnecessary and graphic depictions of sexual violence and very strange uses of magic that hadn't been mentioned before. 

Regardless, I'll be moving on to the Collegeium Chronicles next because I'm enjoying my journey to Valdemar.

4/5 stars

Line of note:
"It can't be undone and I'm not the one to beat a dead dog in hopes of him getting up and running to the hunt." (page 637)

I've always heard the idiom "beat a dead horse," and while they are both brutal, I was quite taken aback by this line!

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Look how big this thing is!!